Innocent Blood
by Arinus
Summary: Severus Snape and his sister Cordelia have a lot of secrets; being magical in a mostly Muggle neighborhood, the way their parents fight behind closed doors. Cordelia has one more, though, and she doesn't even know it yet. AU, Young Severus/Lily/Marauders. Eventually, some SS/LE, RL/OC. This is a relaunch/total rewrite of an idea I had several years ago. All canon chars are in-char.
1. Chapter 1

**Innocent Blood**

**1.**

They were shouting again. His ears perked without his consent, body tense while he strained to hear despite himself. Nothing good ever came of listening to his parents' row, but there was always the physical compulsion to listen, anyway. His body wanted him to be prepared and informed, even if his mind only wanted to be far, far away. He forced his eyes down, scanning the same page of his book without registering any of the words; he wasn't sure for how long. When they were fighting, time was different.

"Sev?" he started. He was so attuned to the muffle of voices coming up and around the staircase, that he hadn't heard his younger sister approach the doorway to his room. He craned his neck around at the sound of her voice, looking to the door without getting off his bed. She was still in her nightdress, even though it was nearly noon.

"All right, Cor?" He didn't exactly invite her to come into his room, but she tiptoed forward anyway, rounded the bed to stand by the head. He was lying on his belly, book spread over his pillow, elbows propping himself up. "You should get dressed," he said, without much enthusiasm.

"Why?"

Severus Snape sighed, placed his index finger in the crease of his book, and shifted his weight. "Because it's nearly the afternoon. It's called a nightdress because you're supposed to wear it at night."

"What are you reading?" Cordelia always shifted subjects as easily as a breath transitioned from inhale to exhale, but seldom as naturally.

"_Hogwarts, A History_," he replied, sitting up. He cradled the book protectively in his lap, finger still marking his page. "Did you know that the ceiling of the Great Hall is enchanted to show the sky outside?"

"Really?" A great rattling _thud_ and a shout downstairs quieted both children; Cordelia padded to the doorway and leaned out into the hall, pale hands pressed to the wood of the doorframe, supporting her weight against it. Another thud, the sound of glass or pottery shattering, and then the thread of argument picked up again. Severus realized he had been holding his breath.

"What do you suppose that was?"

"I don't know," he rubbed his thumb over the embossed title on the cover of his book. "A vase, a glass. Mum's spirit."

"A window," Cordelia said.

"Nah, it wasn't a window. That would've been louder."

'No, at Hogwarts. In the Great Hall. Why didn't they just put a window in the ceiling?"

The shouting stopped; a door slammed. The house rattled in response, and, as if loosed by the same motion, a woman's sobs rose up the stairs.

They made eye contact. "Both of us?" Cordelia asked.

Severus nodded, slipped the book off of his lap and himself off of his bed in one motion. He gripped his sister's hand - cool and dry, it complemented his own sweaty, clammy hand. Ten pale, spindly digits twisted together, unifying the pale, spindly children they belonged to.

Two sets of bare feet gripped the worn floorboards. Two sets of toes curled around the edge of each stair before venturing into the unknown of the stair below. And at the bottom, two sets of skinny legs hesitated on the landing.

The crying stopped, as suddenly as it had started. They heard a loud sniffle, a shivery, hiccupy breath. Severus pushed the landing door open, pulled his sister into the empty sitting room. Drab furniture sat in stoic silence, a threadbare rug, curling up at the edges, lay crookedly over the floor.

"Mum?" Severus ventured, crossing the room to the kitchen, sister still in tow.

A woman was at the kitchen table, sallow face shiny and swollen from tears. Long, limp strands of black hair hung down, ends pooling on the scuffed surface of the table. Around her, the kitchen was in shambles. Overturned plates and cups littered the floor, along with a few pieces of dinnerware that were shattered beyond recognition.

Now that the woman had stopped crying, the kitchen's soundtrack was the _drip drip_ of the leaky kitchen faucet, the resonant buzz of a fly around the rubbish-bin. Sunlight streamed in through the window above the sink, garishly highlighting all that was wrong, undomestic, about the ransacked room and the people within it.

"I thought you two were playing outside," she said listlessly.

Severus shook his head. Cordelia unwound her fingers from her brother's, slipped past their mother. She hooked a thick tangle of inky-black hair behind her ear, bent forward, and began gathering the chipped pieces of pottery from the floor.

"Is everything all right?" the young boy's face was a taut mask of concern divided by a beaky nose, dark eyes shadowed and wide. He was ten years of age, but in that instant he appeared at once much younger and positively ancient.

"Everything's fine," their mother said, and she found that she couldn't meet her son's earnest stare. "Your father's gone out for a bit."

"I wish he'd go out for good," Severus said, and he could feel, unexpectedly a dark bubbling rage. It began, strangely enough, in his toes and boiled itself all the way up to the tips of his ears.

"Watch your mouth," Eileen Snape rose to her feet, pointed a bony finger in her son's face. "An empty belly, no roof over your head. Is that what you want? Don't let him hear you say that."

Severus felt a burn in the whites of his eyes; he thought it was that rage, pouring itself out of him, but then his vision blurred with tears. He blinked them back, or most of them, anyway. A runaway slid down his face, dripped onto the front of his wrinkled, oversized shirt.

"Cor," he managed, sucking in a great breath, "Put some shoes on. You'll cut your feet open."

**#**

Summer was fickle to the Snape children; on the one hand, there was the freedom of the playground, the yard behind their house, the ability to languish in bed long after the sun came up, to wear pyjamas all day if one wanted to. On the other hand, there were the other children at the playground who teased them, the loneliness of the yard with nothing but clumps of straggly weeds between the cobbles to look at, the stifling, sticky heat in their tiny bedrooms after the sun came up, and the nagging despondence that came of wearing pyjamas all day.

Cordelia thought that her brother had gotten a better lot than she, but he was pretty good to her, most of the time, so it never bothered her much. He had his own proper room, with a wardrobe, and he was allowed to go to the playground by himself, and to the fish-and-chips shop at the corner, although neither of them ever had any money to buy anything there.

Her own room was in the partially-finished attic space - tiny, stuffy, and prone to extreme temperatures, although it was isolated from the rest of the house, which she didn't like most of the time, but was fiercely grateful for when their father was drunk and angry. Her room had to be accessed by pulling a rickety wooden staircase down from the ceiling of the first floor, and to get out of it, she had to be careful not to fall through the hole before she had gotten the stairs to unfold properly.

This summer though, Cordelia was starting to resent her brother's freedoms, mostly because he wasn't sharing them all with her anymore. The last few weeks, he had been to the playground nearly every day, and he'd only brought her along twice. She knew he had new friends too, because one day she'd gone out to the yard to see if she could find some dandelions growing between the cobbles, and he was walking away from the house, with a girl with long, pretty red hair.

In her hot, stuffy room, Cordelia lamented how unfair it was that Severus could go out alone and make new friends, and she could not. She was only - and she counted it out in her head - one year, seven months, and six days younger than he was. She would start at Hogwarts the year after him - and she knew she would, because once, she _had _accidentally fallen through the entrance hole of her room, and she had stopped a centimeter above the ground, and Severus had told her it was her magic. And just what was she meant to do at the weekends, when Severus was at Hogwarts and she was left at home? Surely by _then_, she would be allowed to go to the playground by herself?

She rolled over in her bed, eyeing the shelf of battered, dog-eared books on the far wall. Nearly all of them were hand-me-downs from Severus, and she must have read each one at least a hundred times. Even though she loved to read, the thought of reading the _same_ book yet another time made her limbs tingle with irritation; she felt as restless as if she had been asked to live the same day of her life over and over again forever.

School would start again in a few weeks, and even though Cordelia didn't much like the other children in her class, there were always new books every year. She couldn't keep them after the school year was over, so she would read them hungrily over and over again until she had to turn them in in June. Sometimes the things in them were wrong, like her science book in infant school, which had said that magic wasn't real.

She remembered that very well, because she still had a scar on her forearm from that year. She had told her teacher that magic was too real, that her mother could do it, and her brother and herself could do it only sometimes, without really trying to. When the teacher told her she had a lovely imagination, she had tried to explain all about wizarding school and owl post; eventually, the teacher asked her to write all about it and hand it in. Cordelia had, and then she had mostly forgotten about it, until the teacher sent it home in the post to her parents, with a note suggesting they enroll in her in a children's creative writing course.

Tobias had been nearly as furious as she had ever seen him, and, as luck would have it, blind drunk to boot. That was when he had been laid off from his job at the mill, and so he had had most of the day while Cordelia was in school to build up both his anger and his intoxication level. He had raged at her an hour, burned the papers in the fireplace, and then, for good measure, shoved her bodily into into an end table. The lamp on the table had come down and smashed apart when it hit her arm, cutting it open.

She remembered also going to her mother for comfort, but her mother had only glumly told her that she ought to know better than to go around telling all sorts of Muggles about magic; and anyway, the table lamp had been an accident, and that was a story she better not write up for her teacher, unless she wanted them all to go hungry and homeless.

Tobias had only been out of work a few months before he got another job in the next town over as a factory worker, and by that time, Cordelia and Severus had both been knocked around a bit by him; not as bad as their mother, that was true, but everyone was relieved when he had work again.

In her attic room now, Cordelia jumped up from her bed suddenly, crossed the room and chose one of her tired old books at random. She'd rather read _James and the Giant Peach_ for the hundred and first time than think about _that_ time anymore. She hoped Severus would bring her to the playground with him tomorrow. Maybe that girl with the red hair could be her friend, too.

**#**

Severus dug the toe of his worn trainer into the dirt underneath his swing. Next to him, a pretty girl his own age pumped her legs, urging her own swing higher, higher. Rich, red hair streamed behind her, a banner against the summer sky. His eyes followed her back and forth.

"What about unicorns, Severus? Are those real, too?"

He nodded; realized her green eyes were focused on the horizon rather than on him. "Yes. They are. You probably won't see one though, they're rare. Dragons are real, too - but you wouldn't _want_ to meet one of them."

"What about elves? And goblins?"

"Both real," Severus answered, "The wizard bank is all full of goblins, they work there."

Lily reached the height of her arc, and leapt off the swing. She floated gently to the grass, grinning broadly. "I'm so glad I met you, Sev," she said, circling back towards him, "I want to know all about magic and things before I go to Hogwarts."

"I'm really glad I met you too, Lily." He smiled, warmth spreading all throughout him. "We'll do everything together. We'll have the same classes, hopefully we'll be in the same house. I'll show you everything you need to know."

He became aware, halfway through his declaration, that Lily's eyes were focused somewhere behind him. He turned his head, saw a thin, blonde girl with a look as sour as Severus suddenly found his mood.

"Hi, Tuney," Lily said, uncertain.

"Mum wants you home for lunch, Lily. Leave the freak here."

Severus' lip curled. Tuney always ruined everything when she turned up. He couldn't wait until he and Lily were at Hogwarts together, and they could have fun without her always coming along. He was glad Tuney wasn't a witch; imagine if he had to put up with her at Hogwarts, too.

He watched Lily and Tuney walk away, toward the posher end of town. Part of him wanted to follow them, Tuney or no. When he could no longer make out the flash of red that was Lily's hair, he rose reluctantly from his swing, set his feet towards Spinner's End, let them carry him to the house at the end of the row.

**#**

Sometimes, his parents fought about him - how much his school things cost, how they were going to afford his Hogwarts things next year, how he was gone out too often, or stayed in the house too much, how he had managed, simply by virtue of trying to go unnoticed, to strike his father as lazy, disrespectful, disobedient.

They fought about money an awful lot; how they could argue so much about something they didn't have any of, Severus didn't understand. They fought about the house, too. Something was always broken, needing replacement, not where it was meant to be. His father thought his mother should keep the house neat all the time, should serve him dinner, see to their children, and not do much else. He wanted the children out of his sight most of the time, and both of them were happy to oblige.

The worst times were when they fought about his sister, though. There were the usual reasons, the same ones they brought up about Severus, but when his father really got going about Cordelia, it was always bad. The children were never meant to hear, but how could they not, when the house was so small, and the walls seemed to fill and fill with all the anger inside?

Sometimes, the worst times, Tobias said that Cordelia wasn't really his child. When he was very drunk especially, and when Cordelia was around during a row, he'd accuse Eileen of having been with another man, of having a baby with someone else and bringing it home for him, Tobias, to raise. It started with her eyes, always - that was how Severus knew it was going to be one of the bad nights. Eileen had very dark, nearly black eyes, which her son had inherited, and Tobias had muddy brown eyes. Cordelia's, though, were a very pale blue, like ice.

When Severus heard Tobias start in on Cordelia's eye colour, he always made certain that Cor was in her room, with the stairs all closed up. Those were the nights too, that Severus was afraid to check on his mother when the row was done. Nearly always, when they argued about Cordelia, EIleen would have dark blooms of purple and blue on her pale skin; her eyes would be frightening, far away, closed off. Severus hated finding her that way, hated the way that he couldn't quite keep contempt from sliding under his skin, sitting there like a cat curled up next to his veins.

His mother told him, told them both, told Tobias who wouldn't listen, that it wasn't true, that she hadn't been cheating on him, but when Severus saw his sister's face, which really didn't bear any resemblance to their father's, high cheekbones neither of their parents had, unexplained blue eyes, he couldn't help but remember coming home from school one day and catching his mother in a lie.

He'd come into the house; the front room was dim, dark shades drawn against the late afternoon sun. Eileen was staring at the floor; Severus followed her gaze. A sticky brown puddle over the rug, shards of glass littering the floor, his mother's jaw slack with fear, shock. Severus saw a rag in her hand, a blank expanse on the shelf next to her. She had been cleaning, and it had been an accident, but she'd knocked over the bottle of expensive whiskey Tobias had bought himself at Chistmastime; it was still nearly full the last time that Severus had noticed it - his father only drank it every now and again, usually loaded himself up with cheap stuff he bought on his way home from work every Friday.

Eileen had looked at Severus, looked at puddle of liquor on the ground. In a frenzy, she'd mopped up the mess, haphazardly picked up the bits of glass; one piece cut her finger and she never noticed, just kept piling the shards in her other palm. She brought them all outside, to the dustbins in the street. When she came back, she'd gone to the cupboard Tobias kept his cheap whiskeys in, picked a bottle that was nearly full.

She'd drawn her wand - a thing she rarely did, because Tobias didn't like her to use magic - waved it over the bottle, and the bottle morphed, slowly; the label changed, and soon, it looked just like the bottle that had fallen. She put it carefully on the shelf, where the old bottle had been, she'd looked back at Severus, dark eyes hooded.

"That's done," she'd said softly, hollowly. "It's better to hide something that might make him cross than to try to explain it was an accident."

Severus could see his mother's face, looking the way it had that day, every time they fought about Cordelia; every time she told his father that he was wrong, that Cordelia was his by blood as much as Severus was. The thing was, Tobias had never mentioned the whiskey; never guessed what had happened - but then, the whiskey had only been different inside; there was no label on the outside to tell him that he'd been cheated.


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

Rain was in the air; dreary gray breezes blew through the playground, setting the roundabout listlessly spinning. Empty swings nudged forward, fell back. Every now and then, wind would catch in the eaves of nearby buildings, under the curve of the slide, howling like little ghost children. Two pale, gaunt, bedraggled siblings sat in the swings, looking not unlike ghost children themselves.

"We should go back home," Severus said glumly, "It's going to be pouring soon."

"I don't care," Cordelia said, kicking a spray of dirt up with the toe of her trainers. If Severus' trainers were worn and dirty, Cordelia's were doubly so, because they had once been his. "I'd rather sit here in the rain than go home and listen to them row."

"Mum will be cross if we come into the house with wet clothes and mud, you know she will." Still, there wasn't much conviction in Severus' odd little face.

"Do you think they ever got along?" Cordelia wondered, chewing on her bottom lip absently.

"Dunno," Severus said, gliding back and forth without much enthusiasm, eyes shifting between his sister, the heavy clouds overhead. A breeze lifted his stringy black hair, pushed it straight into his eyes. He clawed it away, felt a raindrop land fat and cold at his crown, slide down his forehead. "It's hard to imagine."

"I wouldn't marry someone if I couldn't get along with them," his sister said earnestly, "If they were mean, I'd just tell them to go away and I'd be by myself."

"Yeah," Severus agreed, "Me too." He tried to imagine it, briefly; finding someone he would want to be with forever, deciding to get married. It seemed such a long way off, both in time and probability, that it might be never. He thought maybe could glimpse it, just for a second: holding someone's hand, smiling at her. In his mind, she had red hair. Severus blushed, glanced at his sister to see if she had noticed.

Cordelia's pale eyes were focused somewhere faraway - not absent, exactly, just somewhere else. A cold breeze whipped hanks of tangled black hair in her face, but she hardly seemed aware of it.

"We should go home," Severus said again, shifting his weight off of the swing reluctantly. "Maybe they won't be arguing anymore. Come on, Cor - hey, you're bleeding."

She was. Small, bright beads of shiny blood dotted her lower lip, where she had bitten down; she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth carelessly, stood up from the swings.

"Why don't you want me to meet your friends?" she tilted her face towards him, feet planted in the dirt that was rapidly becoming mud as more and more fat raindrops fell.

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw you with a girl, in the yard. I wanted to play, too."

"That's only one friend," Severus said, because it was all he could think to say.

The sky opened up. Bullets of rain came down, and Cordelia shrieked; both children started running for home, mud splashing up and sticking to their trainers, the legs of their trousers.

Soaked to the bone, they rounded the house, skirting the front door and running across the cobbled yard to the kitchen door. Severus pulled the door open, and they piled inside, where the staccato rhythm of the rain faded in intensity.

They stood in the kitchen, dripping onto the linoleum floor. The interior of the house was dark, and felt silent and still.

"I'll go get a towel," Cordelia said, her voice loud and somehow flat in the heavy quiet. She tore through the kitchen, shoes squelching - she was already in the living room when Severus called after her.

"Shoes, Cory!"

Cordelia didn't respond to him; instead she remain rooted to the floor, a few steps inside the living room, staring at something in the corner where a bookshelf surprisingly devoid of books and an armchair lived.

"H-hi, Dad," she said, her voice small. Barely contained fright pushed at the edges of her voice, causing it to waver. Severus felt his heart speed up, unbidden, and he slipped out of his shoes, thunking them down on the ratty little mat inside the kitchen door. He prowled to the living room, slipped up behind his sister, a protective if equally helpless shadow.

Tobias was in the armchair, a glass of whiskey in the hand that dangled over the edge of the chair. Dirty, thinning brown hair fanned across his forehead, hung too long behind his ears. Beads of sweat glistened on his clammy skin.

"You heard your brother," he drawled, and there was a bitterness in his voice that chilled Severus to his core. "'_Shoes, Cory,_'_'_" he imitated, in a sneering, whiny imitation of his son.

Cordelia backed up, colliding with her brother. She found her way around him, into the kitchen, and kicked one shoe off, letting it fall on the mat next to Severus'. The other one was stuck; she reached down and yanked it off with her hands, getting mud all over her fingers, then stripped off her wet socks and put them on top of her shoes. She stayed by the kitchen door, watching her brother apprehensively; he seemed as rooted to his spot as she had been moments before, only instead of looking at Tobias, he was staring down at the worn rug.

She stood in the kitchen in her bare feet, looked longingly out at the pouring rain; they should have just stayed at the playground.

"Where is she?" Tobias asked his son, though he didn't pause for an answer. "It doesn't take that long to remove your trainers, does it?"

Cordelia's teeth clamped down on her lip again, and she slunk back into the sitting room, drawing up beside Severus.

"We... we were going to go upstairs and play," Severus said, hating the way his voice sounded - wispy, whiny.

"Then go play," Tobias said shortly, waving a hand towards the stairs on the other side of his chair. When neither of the children moved, he snorted impatiently. "Go play," he repeated, sneering at his son down the length of his hooked nose. "Your _sister _will be right up."

There was a sinister, slippery way to the way he said 'sister'. Foreboding filled Severus, and something - fear, rage perhaps - pushed at the inside of Severus' skin, making him tingle all over.

Still, he knew better than to deliberately disobey his father. He cast Cordelia a sorrowful look, crossed the sitting room. He started, blanching, when he passed Tobias' chair and thought he saw the man move. Tobias chuckled. Severus ran the last step, jumped up onto the first stair. He scrambled halfway up the staircase, then slapped his palms on the next couple of stairs, trying to make it sound like he had gone all the way up.

"Come here," Tobias said, crooking his finger at Cordelia. She stepped forward, just one step; hovered in place in case she needed to change direction quickly.

"I said come here," Tobias growled, shifting in his chair; before he rose, Cordelia scurried forward. Leaning forward, the last of his whiskey still sloshing around in the glass he held in his left hand, he reached his right out, took hold of the first bit of the little girl that he could reach - her wrist.

He dragged her the last step; she stumbled, righting herself at the last second. Still gripping her wrist, he pulled her close, staring into her face. She could smell the sour stench of the whiskey, saw the little hairs poking out of his nose. She felt suddenly like she might retch, but knew that she mustn't...

"Not my nose," he said, making a show of looking her over. "Not my brow. Not my chin. Definitely not my eyes." he chuckled, as if sharing a joke with the child. "Those aren't your mother's eyes either, duckling. So...where do we suppose you got them?"

In the stairwell, Severus bit down on his knuckles to keep from making any noise; this was bad. This was very, very bad. Where was their mother?

"Do you have any ideas?" he had gotten very quiet; Severus could barely hear him.

"M... maybe one of my grandparents had blue eyes," Cordelia stammered; her heart pounded so fiercely that it beat along the whole of her body; she felt as if all of her skin was pulsing with it. "My teacher... my teacher s-says there are..." and here was the worst moment in her life, she thought, to forget the right word for something.

"Says there are what?" His fingers around her wrist were crushing; tears filled her eyes, slid down her cheeks.

"S-she says there are... recess... things," Cordelia finished lamely.

_Recessive traits_, Severus thought from his perch, but of course he couldn't say anything to help her. Instead, he mentally willed the words to find their way into his father's head; now, he thought, was when he could use some of his sporadic magic.

Tobias grunted. "That's what I thought too, but I asked your mother to show me some pictures. I saw a lot of faces in that photo album, ducky, but would you believe it? Not a one with blue eyes."

He released his hold on her wrist, lifted his glass, and sucked down the rest of his whiskey. A solitary bit of half-melted ice clinked against the glass as he set it down on the floor next to his chair. Cordelia took a half-step backwards.

"Yes," Tobias hissed, eyes narrowing, and then he slammed his fist on the arm of the chair, bellowed.

"Yes, girl, back away from me. Me, who keeps you fed, who gives you a bed to sleep in, who buys your clothes, those sodding shoes you just used to trail mud all over _my_ house! Tell me, girl, are you afraid of me? When I've only given you a home, a life? Are you?"

Severus screwed his eyes shut, praying fervently that his sister would answer correctly; she was given to honesty at the most inopportune times.

"N... no, sir." she whispered, swallowed. "I-I mean, yes, sir. I don't... I don't know, sir." Tears slid down her face; she didn't know what answer he wanted; only knew that she wanted, desperately to be able to get away from him, before that sour brown liquid he had been drinking loosed the reins on his temper.

"Well, then. You're not very bright, are you?"

"I don't know."

Tobias threw his head back, laughed darkly, mirthlessly. After a moment, his hand snaked forward again, gripped the little girl's chin in his fingers tightly, pulling her face close to his.

"That's the thing, isn't it, little ducky? You don't know. And me, I don't know where you got those eyes from. Only thing I _do_ know is, if I find out that your mother's been carrying on with some blue-eyed bloke, and making me raise his brat, I'll give the both of you a reason to be afraid of me."

He smiled humorlessly then, showing small, yellowed teeth. "Now go play with your brother." He released her chin, pushing backwards as he did so, so that Cordelia lost her footing, landing on the rough, threadbare rug on her hands and knees. The stairwell was right in front of her; without bothering to stand, she scrambled up the first few stairs, only righting herself partway up, when she stumbled into her brother, again.

Silently, Severus gripped her hand and tugged; both children's feet clattered on the wooden steps, down the hall. Severus reached up, yanking on the cord that pulled down the attic stairs, and he motioned his sister up, climbing the rickety stairs behind her. When they reached the top, he pulled the stairs up behind him, grabbing the cord in his other hand and tucking the end of it into the crack between the stairwell opening and the floor of Cordelia's room, so that the stairs could only be opened from the inside.

**#**

School started again, and Severus couldn't focus - he held a buzzing awareness that it would be his last year in Muggle school, before he could leave Spinner's End and his parents behind for the whole school year. In light of the things his mother had told him he'd learn at Hogwarts - potions-brewing, spell casting, flying on broomsticks - it was hard to muster enough energy to learn long division, or memorize the periodic table of the elements.

He and Cordelia were at the same school this year, but he and Lily were not. There were two junior schools in town; one at the run-down end, which he and his sister attended, and a posher one at the other end of town, shared with neighboring suburbs, where Lily and Tuney went. He found his mind oft-wandering, as he gazed out of the classroom windows, to thoughts of Lily. Sometimes, they would play together after school, but unlike Severus, Lily did care about her Muggle school marks, and she was doing homework a lot of afternoons - or at least, that's what she told him when he rapped at her door after school.

He did see her at the weekends sometimes, though. Sometimes Tuney came with her, but sometimes he had her all to himself.

One Saturday, when his mother was moping around the house after another row, and neither Severus or Cordelia felt like they could stand the quiet misery inside the four walls of the house on Spinner's End, he took her to the playground. Approaching, he saw a familiar red head standing at the top of the slide, and he hesitated, glancing down at Cordelia; she was already running towards the slide.

"Hello!" she called, not slowing down until she stood at the bottom. "You're my brother's friend! What's your name?"

Lily flashed a smile, dropped herself down the slide. When she got to the bottom, she stood and looked over the smaller girl's head, took in Severus with his now-familiar smock of a shirt, his loose overcoat.

"My name is Lily," she said, and then, "Sev," she called, cocking her head in Severus' direction, "You never said your sister was almost our age. I thought she was really small, the way you talk about her."

"She is small," Severus said scornfully, drawing up behind his sister, "She's only just nine."

Cordelia's tangled hair fanned out as her head whipped around to face her brother. "I'm not that little! I'll start H- I'm... not that much smaller than you," she caught herself just in time. remembering that her and her brother weren't alone.

"You were going to say Hogwarts," Lily said, "weren't you? Are you a... a witch, too?"

Cordelia's blue eyes grew wide. "Sev, you told her? Dad's going to-"

"Cordelia!" Severus hissed, blanching. His eyes roved from his sister to Lily, and back. "Shh," he calmed himself, with effort. "It's okay, Cor. She's a witch, too. But don't go yelling about it."

"Are you going to Hogwarts next year with Severus?" Cordelia asked eagerly.

Lily nodded. "I think so. I mean, I haven't gotten the letter yet, but your brother says I will, when I'm eleven."

"On your birthday," Cordelia confirmed, as though she had a source besides Severus and their mother, "I'm going to stay awake all night and all day on my eleventh birthday, so I can see the owl coming."

Lily laughed, and then offered Cordelia her hand. "Come on. Let's go see who can swing the highest."

**#**

The air was chill with fall's arrival. Severus and Cordelia met outside the front doors of the primary school; his hands swung free at his sides; Cordelia's arms were loaded with schoolbooks.

Severus reached out, took most of his sister's books. "D'you really need to bring _all_ of these home?"

"It's Friday," she said, shifting her grip on the two books Severus had left her to carry. They started walking in the direction of their house. "I have homework, and besides, I want something to read at the weekend."

"You're going to read your maths book?" he craned his neck, looked at the spines on the books he was carrying for her.

"I like to read the word problems," she said, matter-of-factly.

Severus smirked. "Since when do you like maths problems? Remember last year, when you started crying in the middle of your exam last year, and the school nurse made me come sit with you until you stopped blubbering?"

"That's different," Cordelia sniffed.

"I had no idea why they pulled me out of class, then I get in to the nurse's office and you look like someone died so I asked you what was wrong, and you said - I remember exactly, because it was so hard not to laugh - you said, 'long division is my turtle enemy'. I couldn't even tell you it was 'mortal', you'd have gone spare."

"You knew what I meant," she muttered, cheeks going a very faint shade of pink."And anyway, I don't do the problems, I just like to read them - you know, 'Sally has five pounds to buy chocolate, which costs sixty pence per bar, how much chocolate can she buy?' I don't care how _much_ chocolate she can buy, I want to know what she needs that much chocolate _for_."

"And you get all that from your maths book?"

Cordelia shrugged, and he could tell her mind was going somewhere else already. There was something in the tilt of her chin that gave it away to him - he could usually see the shift in her eyes, too. Sometimes, it was just the way her mind worked, but sometimes it was an escape tactic, when she was scared, or hurt.

"All right, Cor?" he asked gently, "I'm only playing. you know."

"Sev, how come you didn't want Lily to meet me?"

"I dunno. Sometimes you say things you shouldn't."

"Like what?"

"Well, you almost started talking about Hogwarts in front of Lily, and you didn't know she was a witch yet."

Cordelia frowned. "But now it's fine to talk to her about Hogwarts, and you still never let me play with you."

"There's other stuff, too." he shifted uncomfortably, glancing down at her. "Y'know, things with Mum and Dad, and... I dunno. Forget it."

"I don't like having to stay at home by myself with them. I'd rather go to the playground with you."

"I know, Cor," he said, strained. Petulance played at the corners of his mouth. "But I do take you there all the time, and I give you all my old books and things, and I let you hang around in my room all the time. I share things with you all the time, and I just want... I just want my own friend."

"But you'll have Hogwarts all to yourself next year," Cordelia said, and he could hear the hurt in her voice. "And I'll just be stuck at home being yelled at, and hiding in my stupid room."

"You'll be going soon enough, and I'll show you everything about the castle, okay? And I'll help you with your classes if you need it. Ah c'mon, Cory. Don't cry."

"I'm not," she sniffed, as a fat tear rolled down her cheek.

They drew up in front of their house, and Severus groped in his pocket for the key, balancing his sister's schoolbooks on his other arm. He pushed the door open and Cordelia stormed past him; turned back, and grabbed the rest of her books from his arms. Clutching the whole stack of them to her chest, she ran up the stairs, and he heard the books _thunk_ down on the floor of the hallway.

He followed her, saw the books stacked on the floor while she stretched up on her tiptoes, reaching for the cord that would pull the stairs to her room down.

"Hey," Severus stepped up beside her, and pulled her into a hug. "Just because I have another friend doesn't mean we aren't still friends, too. You're my sister, we're always gonna stick together, at home and at Hogwarts. Okay?"

Cordelia nodded, wiping her hand across her eyes. "Okay."

Severus reached up; he was a few inches taller than her, so he could reach the cord more easily. He pulled the staircase down. "Go do your homework, and I'll take you to the playground tomorrow."

"Even if Lily is there, too?"

Severus nodded. "No more crying though, or the deal's off, right?"

She gave him a wobbly smile, bent down to pick up her books, and returned his nod. "Thanks, Severus."

He watched her climb into her room, dumping her books on floor beside the stair-hole, then he ducked into his own bedroom, easing the door closed.

"Girls," he muttered peevishly, kicking his shoes off the end of his bed as he settled into it. He snatched _Hogwarts, A History_ off his night-table, and curled up to read it until supper.


	3. Chapter 3

**3.**

Inevitably, the school year passed, from one day into the next, and as it went a sense of anticipation grew within Severus just as a sense of dread grew in Cordelia. It would be the first year they spent apart; worse, in Cordelia's opinion, the first year she spent in the house alone with their parents.

When Severus' Hogwarts letter had come, Cordelia had gone up to her room quietly so that Severus wouldn't see her jealousy on her face. She knew it wasn't fair to envy him - she would go away too, if she could, and in fact she would next year - but she couldn't help the way that fear and dread and, yes, jealousy rose up within her, clouding her happiness for him.

Still, after his birthday, when the novelty of the Hogwarts letter had faded against the daily routine of school, and homework, and going to the playground with him, and hiding from their father in the evenings, she managed to almost forget about the fact that he was leaving her.

Until the day, two weeks before the end of the summer, when their mother took Severus on a special trip to Diagon Alley to purchase his school supplies. Cordelia begged to be allowed to go too, but their mother said no. Instead, she was stuck inside the house with an irritable Tobias, who was pained to see his hard-earned money going to all the schoolbooks and things that his son needed to start at Hogwarts. Cordelia had wisely stayed out of his way, electing to hole herself up in the stuffy, sweltering heat of her attic room instead.

It must have been the heat, she would reflect later, but something happened to her that afternoon. She had been standing in front of her bookshelf, glumly eyeing the row of familiar titles, wishing she could have kept some of her books from school, because at least she hadn't read them a hundred times, when she felt suddenly weak-kneed, light on her feet. Something like queasiness gripped her, and she was instantly certain that she was horribly ill somehow, though she had been fine only moments before. She remembered reaching her hand out to steady herself against the wall. She could see her hand touching the wall, but she couldn't feel it; it was like she was having a dream, nothing felt tangible anymore. _Was_ she having a dream?

The next thing that she was aware of was opening her eyes; the unfinished wooden floor stretched out in front of her; she could see the legs of her bed on the horizon, although they rocked back and forth when she tried to focus on them. She lifted herself up, trying to shake the grogginess out of her head; she realized that she had a headache, and she slowly became aware that her knee hurt, too. She gathered herself into a sitting position on the floor, looked at her knee. It was scraped up - nothing worse than she'd gotten numerous times at the playground, but there were two or three little splinters of wood, too.

She was still dizzy; she closed her eyes, concentrated on breathing in and out, and eventually, she felt like she could stand again. She rose, walked carefully over to her bed, and set to picking the splinters out of her knee. She winced when she accidentally pushed one in further before getting a grip on it with her fingernails, but she knew there would be no point in going to Tobias for help, and her mother and brother weren't home.

The rest of the day, she felt strange. Better, but not completely herself. She felt like she was walking through water when she went downstairs for supper; when Severus tried to show her all of his new things for school, she could barely muster a tired smile through her headache. True, a great number of his school things had been purchased secondhand, but it did little to diminish Severus' buoyancy at having received them.

Cordelia thought that she wouldn't be able to eat, but she was surprised to find herself clearing her plate in record time. Most likely in an effort to appease Tobias, their mother Eileen had cooked steak, which was a rarity in their household, since they could never afford it, and Cordelia had actually licked her plate clean for possibly the first time in her life.

Severus had saved his most prized new possession for last; only after the supper dishes had been cleared, and with a hushed sort of reverence, he opened a long, narrow box and drew out a length of polished birch wood with an ornate handle.

"Look, Cory! I'm a real wizard now; I've got a magic wand."

Tobias snorted derisively as he left the room; Severus hardly seemed to have noticed - his face was aglow in a way that his sister couldn't remember ever seeing. He waved his wand a couple of times, experimenting with the way it felt to hold, the way it _swished_ through the air with an efficiency that made him feel as though it were just itching to cast some real spells.

Cordelia was feeling a little more like herself after eating; she clapped her hands eagerly. "Can you do any spells yet?" she asked, even though she knew that he hadn't learned any yet.

"You can't do magic outside of Hogwarts until you're of age," Severus explained again, "So I couldn't show you even if I knew any spells." He looked to his mother, perhaps for confirmation, or perhaps he was hoping she would indulge him and give him permission to try a spell.

Eileen only pressed her mouth into a thin line, loading the sink up with the supper dishes. From the living room came the faint creaking of Tobias' armchair as he settled into it, and then a meaty belch.

"How did you choose your wand?" Cordelia asked, "Was it on discount?"

Nearly everything the Snape family owned had been purchased secondhand or on discount, and often both, so it was a fair question, but their mother whipped around, caught her daughter's eye with a warning glare.

"Mum's told you before," Severus said carefully, glancing at his mother as his ears perked for further sounds from the direction of the living room, "The wand chooses the wizard. They take your measurements and all that, and then you practice waving wands around until something happens. This one felt warm, and green sparkles shot out of the end; it's birch and dragon heartstring."

"Oh," Cordelia said, "I wasn't sure if that was what Mum really told me, or if I just had a dream about buying a wand."

"Discount," Tobias sneered from the other room, and all three of them in the kitchen, Eileen, Severus, and Cordelia, stiffened. "A month's salary on sodding school supplies, and the brat wants to know if it was on _discount_."

Cordelia looked stricken, but Severus just put his wand carefully away, gathered it up with the rest of his new things.

"I'm going to bring this stuff up to my room, Mum," Severus said quietly. In the other room, Tobias rocketed wordlessly to his feet, the chair creaking and thumping behind him. Three sharp steps, and then he was pulling a bottle off of its shelf. He uncapped it, swirled it around, inhaling the scent of the brown stuff inside; bottle in hand, he strode into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and took down a glass, still without sparing a word to any of them.

Severus, arms laden, ducked carefully out of the room, crossing the living room and climbing the stairs as quickly as he could without dropping anything. Cordelia watched their father, eyes wide, while Eileen scrubbed at the dishes in the sink with a dingy rag, despite the fact that her own wand lay in plain sight on the kitchen table.

Tobias poured whiskey into the glass, took a long swallow. He stayed where he was, in the corner of the kitchen, glass in one hand and bottle in the other.

"Did you like the steak?" Eileen ventured, voice small. She tried to smile, but found that it took a lot more energy than she remembered.

Tobias ignored her, fixed his eyes on Cordelia, where she still sat at the table. Cordelia felt her heart race, and the thin, airy feeling returned to her head. She was glad, suddenly, that she was still seated, but dread pushed at her from the outside in; the air in the kitchen was sticky, heavy with resentment; she didn't know if it was hers, or her father's, or even Eileen's, as she stood there, dutifully elbow deep in scalding, soapy water for dishes she could have washed in seconds with magic.

She felt, then, that something terrible was about to happen; she winced without meaning to, though Tobias was feet away from her, though he hadn't moved save to take another long draw of whiskey. The seconds stretched out; Tobias watched her through narrowed eyes. Eileen cleared her throat, eyes darting nervously between husband and daughter.

"I think it's time for children to be in bed," Tobias said, the words drawn out, anticlimactically. Eileen's shoulders dropped, and Cordelia realized they had been hunched, tense, the whole time Tobias had been in the kitchen. "Isn't it a school night?"

It was August, and school started in two weeks, and all three of them knew it. Cordelia slipped off her chair, crossed the distance to the stairs, barely felt her feet touching the steps. She didn't go to bed, though; instead she ducked into Severus' room without knocking.

He looked up as she entered. He was sitting on his bed, with all of his Hogwarts things spread out in front of him. He looked her over in an instant, concern pushing in at the edges of his expression despite an attempt at a smile. "Everything all right?" he asked.

Cordelia nodded, easing his door closed behind her. "Dad told me to go to bed because it's a school night," she murmured, "He knew better, I think he just didn't want to look at me anymore."

"Don't say that, Cor," Severus said absently, fingering the frayed cloth jacket of one of his school books.

"It's true," she said, matter-of-factly, "And I don't care, I don't want to look at him either."

Severus sighed. "You didn't have to say the thing about my wand being on discount," he admonished half-heartedly.

"I thought it might've been a dream," she repeated, as though this were a commonplace mistake, and perhaps for her it was. Cordelia, Severus knew, always had one foot in her own world.

"Still," Severus said, "You know he's touchy about money."

Cordelia frowned, running her finger over the edge of Severus' bedspread. "He's touchy about everything."

Severus pressed his lips together in much the same way as his mother, exhaled through his nose. "Cory," he said, after a pause, "Be careful when I'm gone. Don't give him a reason to be cross with you. Just… just stay in your room when you're not at school, or go to the playground, if Mum lets you go alone."

Cordelia bit her lip, and even though she didn't think she'd put much pressure into it, she felt a warm bead of blood well up. Her tongue slinked out of her mouth, licking the drop away, before she answered him.

"I wish he didn't hate me so much," she said, forlornly, "I wish I looked just like him, so he'd stop."

Severus laughed bitterly, reflexively pulling his books and robes closer on the bed, as if trying to cloak himself with the reality of his impending escape to Hogwarts. "How much better do you think it would get, Cory?"

**#**

On the first of September, Cordelia had begged to be allowed to see Severus off at the station, and finally their mother had relented, excusing her from school for the day. It passed in a blur, and Cordelia warred with the desire to be happy for him, and the pit of despair that was growing in her stomach.

All too soon, he was stepping onto the train on the heels of his friend Lily, and Cordelia's vision of the scarlet train was blurred by tears; he turned and waved, and she bit her lip and waved back, even though every fiber of her being was willing her to throw caution to the winds and jump on the train behind him.

The whistle blew, and the train pulled away. Cordelia remained rooted to the pavement, until Eileen tugged at her elbow gently. "Come on," she said, "You'll have your turn next year."

As they walked back through the wall between Platforms 9 and 10, Cordelia felt the heat of her tears streaming down her face. After a few steps, Eileen paused, rummaging in the pocket of her worn, patched coat. Her hand emerged with a handkerchief twisted between her thin fingers; she passed it to her daughter, who siped half-heartedly at her tears, and held the handkerchief back out in her mother's direction.

Eileen glanced down as she went to take it, and then stopped, tsking. "You're bleeding," she said, wiping the handkerchief across Cordelia's lips roughly. She squinted. "You mustn't bite your lip anymore," she said, "You've got marks where you keep doing it."

"I don't do it on purpose," Cordelia sniffed defensively. Her mother frowned, and turned to face her daughter directly, leaning down to look at her closely. People streamed around them on their way to and from the other platforms.

"Open your mouth," Eileen said, and there was something in her voice that frightened Cordelia. She parted her lips uncertainly, letting her jaw drop partway open.

"Smile," Eileen said, insistently, and it was the most absurd thing that Cordelia could have imagined, at that moment. Her brother was gone, wouldn't come back home until Christmas, and would be gone again soon after. She felt like half her world had been ripped away, and now her mother was inches from her face in a crowded train station, asking her to smile. Cordelia bared her teeth, still feeling twin hot pinpricks in her eyes of tears threatening to fall.

Eileen sucked in her breath suddenly, and her face turned the color of sour milk. Her eyes went blank, shuttered, and she stuffed the handkerchief back into her pocket, gripping Cordelia's hand tightly and pulling her through the crowd, towards the exit.

"Mum, what's wrong?" she asked urgently; now there were people pressing against her, whipping past her, and she was dizzy again. Her mother's suddenly iron grip was the only thing she could keep track of through the blur of the crowd.

Eileen wouldn't answer; she shook her head every time Cordelia asked. When they got home, she told Cordelia to go play in her room, and as Cordelia climbed the stairs, she could hear her mother opening and closing cupboard doors, rinsing off a pan, checking the icebox.

Tobias wasn't due home for hours yet, which meant that Eileen was preparing an elaborate supper, if she was starting already, which meant that something had happened that was likely to anger him. Severus going away to Hogwarts had been an expected event, so as far as Cordelia could see, that left only one thing: whatever had bothered her mother when she'd looked at Cordelia's face.

Instead of climbing the attic stairs to her room, Cordelia slunk into the washroom, stood on her tiptoes, and examined herself closely in the tiny, chipped mirror over the sink. Her skin was pale, paler even than her brother's, and her light blue eyes stood out against her skin. The dark slashes of her eyebrows, coupled with her narrow chin made her small face look severe. Her nose was a bit long, but it was narrow too, and didn't hook like her father's or her brother's. Her lips were full, and on the bottom lip, she could see twin indentations made from biting down, just like her mother had said. She bared her teeth again, the way she had done for her mother at the train station.

They were a bit yellowish; she often forgot to brush them. Maybe that was why she hadn't noticed what Eileen had surely seen today - two of her teeth, the canines, were half again as long as her front teeth, and they narrowed to a sharp little point. But that was normal, wasn't it? Everyone's canine teeth were a bit pointy, she thought, and stretched her mouth wider. She turned her head this way and that, trying to gauge whether they really were longer than normal.

She closed her mouth, bit down on her lip in the same way she always did; and then she noticed how two of her teeth, the pointy ones, extended beneath the edge of her upper lip, and dug into the flesh of her lower lip.

She was sure, now. They didn't look like everyone else's teeth. They looked like tiny fangs. She scowled, pulling her lips tightly over her teeth. So what? She had weird teeth. There were worse things, right?

**#**

The next time it happened, Cordelia was in science class at school. This time, she was seated, book open on her desk, eyes studying the diagram of the layers of the earth. She already knew the names for each of the layers, knew what they were composed of, but she found herself wondering, as she stared at the small drawing of the earth's core, if it were possible that there were people that lived there.

She knew, of course, that people like herself, regular humans - even witches - wouldn't be able to live there, but what if there were different kinds of people, or creatures, that could live in the extreme heat, that didn't need water or air to breathe? She knew from her brother that there were creatures in the magical world that didn't need to eat like regular people, that mermaids could live underwater and breathe through their gills, so maybe there were some kind of molten-men that could live far beneath the surface of the earth, snug and warm.

She was looking at the drawing in the book and thinking all of this, when she realized that the book seemed a lot further away suddenly, like she had stood up and then climbed a ladder while looking down at her book. She turned her head to make sure she was still level with her classmates; the room rocked in front of her, streaks of color dancing in front of her eyes; she was so dizzy, again, and she felt something grip her from the inside; a terrible cramp, or perhaps just an overwhelming urge to vomit. She didn't want to, not here in front of her whole class - she had to keep it together. She concentrated on drawing a deep breath, only she felt like her heart was beating so hard it was stopping her from inhaling all the way; it was pounding through her chest, swelling, taking up the space that should have been reserved for her lungs to expand, and suddenly she no longer cared if anyone saw her faint or retch; she only hoped that she wasn't about to die, here in the classroom of her Muggle school, before she ever even made it to Hogwarts…

Everything - the pain, the blurry, smeary shapes, the clenching in her gut - it all disappeared as she sank, unceremoniously, into an empty blackness.

Then - opening her eyes, late afternoon sunlight streaming in from her left - but, the windows were always on her right in her science classroom, weren't they? She slowly realized that she was lying down, but not on a floor; it felt like a soft bed. She blinked, and the room around her slowly came into focus. It wasn't her classroom, or any room she had ever been in before.

The bed had railings, like a baby's crib. The walls and ceilings were all white; there was a window to her left, and a curtain to her right. Beyond it, she could hear someone's labored breathing. A hospital. She must be in a hospital room, she realized, though she couldn't remember ever being in one before.

She craned her neck, looking down the length of her body. She was covered with a blanket, but her arms were outside of it. She could see a long wire running from a stand next to the bed. A needle at the end of the wire was taped to the inside of her elbow, poking into her skin. Something in the room was beeping; she couldn't tell if it was on her side of the curtain or not.

She felt her heart speed up again, and she took a few shallow, quick breaths. Why was she here, all alone? Where were her classmates, her teacher? What if no one knew she was here, what if her mother was looking for her at the school?

And then she could hear quick footsteps, coming closer. Before she had time to decide if they sounded familiar, the curtain was drawn back a few inches, and a woman in a white apron came into her side of the little room. She had a clipboard in her arm, she was looking down at it; a strand of honey-colored hair slipped forward, and when she reached her hand to push it behind her ear, she looked up, smiling softly at Cordelia.

"You're awake, dear. Glad to see it. We just need to run some of your blood tests again - something must have gone wrong with them."

Cordelia stared blankly, or so she thought; some of her fear must have shown on her face, because the nurse came over, patted her arm gently. "It won't hurt too much, don't fret."

The nurse frowned, moved her hand from Cordelia's arm to her forehead. "You're awfully cool; did they take your temperature?" She didn't really seem to be asking Cordelia, so the little girl didn't answer. Another woman came in then, this one wearing a long coat, with a medical instrument around her neck. Cordelia thought she had seen a picture of one before, but she couldn't remember what it was called.

"Snape, Cordelia. Who ran her vitals and her blood tests?" the new woman asked brusquely, "These numbers are all wrong."

"Sophie did. I was just about to run them again, but…" the nurse turned her hand over, so the back of it touched Cordelia's forehead. "She does feel quite cool. Could it be a circulatory problem?

"It's quite possible, but with the numbers on her chart, she wouldn't be with us, so we need to run them again."

The nurse nodded, and she took something from the pocket of her apron; it was a strip of fabric with a tube and a gauge on it; another thing Cordelia thought she'd seen a picture of, perhaps in her science book.

There were raised voices in the hallway; both womens' heads turned. Then, "Ma'am, you need to check in -"

Forceful, hurried steps came into the room, the curtain was pushed aside like a spiderweb. Eileen Snape strode into the hospital room, dark eyes flashing; she was full of energy, something between anger and fear; Cordelia had never seen her move as fast as she did now.

"Come on, Cordelia. We're leaving." She stepped up to the bed; she looked like she was about to try and rip the wire right out of her daughter's arm.

Both women were taken aback; the first nurse recovered first. "Mrs. Snape?" she questioned.

"Yes," Eileen said, and she gestured to the wire instead of touching it. "Take that off her; I'm taking her home."

"Mrs. Snape," the nurse tried again, "We really think it's in your daughter's best interest to stay here a bit-"

"No," Eileen said again, "I don't want her to be treated here. I'm her mother; I can make that call."

"That's certainly true," the other woman said, and she extended her hand out for Eileen to shake, offered a professional smile. "I'm Dr. Nicholls. I work with children admitted through emergency services. I know she looks much better now, but your daughter had a fairly severe medical episode today, and I really think it's best if she stay here so we can figure out what caused it."

"I'm taking her to our family doctor," Eileen said, and Cordelia opened her mouth to ask her mother what she was talking about; as far as she knew, she had never been to a doctor in her life. She hadn't needed to; folk with magical blood rarely got sick.

"Oh," Dr. Nicholls said, undeterred, "Does your family doctor have any recent bloodwork records that we could see? We ran our own tests today, and we were just about to run them again, since the numbers were so far outside of normal ranges on several counts… Has she ever had strange test results before?"

Eileen pressed her mouth into a line, exhaled. Cordelia could see the way her mother's eyes went wide, round; the same eyes she had when Tobias was drinking. Fear, plain as day.

"I appreciate your concern," Eileen managed, "But I am taking Cordelia to another doctor, right now. Don't run anymore tests. I'm not paying for the ones you've already run."

The nurse softened. "If it's a financial concern-"

"Now," Eileen said wearily, gesturing once more to the needle in her daughter's arm.

The women exchanged a glance, but Eileen had won. Within fifteen minutes, she was striding out of the hospital with her daughter's hand gripped firmly in her own.

**#**

They didn't go to another doctor. Cordelia asked her mother if there was a special wizard hospital they were going to instead; her mother said there was, but that Cordelia wasn't going. Instead, Eileen asked her a bunch of questions about what had happened - how exactly did it feel, how often had it happened before, could Cordelia tell she was going to faint before it happened, and on and on until the little girl's head was spinning.

When they got home, Eileen fed the family dinner quickly, then sent Cordelia to her room, without a word to Tobias of what had happened that day. For once, she was glad to be sent to her room early, because her head was still light; she went to bed as soon as she got upstairs.

The next day, Cordelia got up and dressed for school. She climbed down the attic stairs, wondering with trepidation if the other students would make fun because of what had happened yesterday. She didn't wonder for long, though. When she got downstairs, her mother was waiting for her in the kitchen, a bowl of porridge steaming on the table. There were bits of sausage in it, a rare treat.

"You're going to stay home from school today," Eileen told her, "We're going on a special trip instead, but it's a secret. You can't tell your father, or your teacher, or anyone at school."

Cordelia slurped a spoonful of porridge, swallowed, looked up at her mother. "Can I tell Severus?"

EIleen shook her head. "Not for now. Just you and I, all right?"

"Where are we going?" she asked through another mouthful of porridge, "Are we going to the wizard hospital?"

"No," Eileen put her jacket on, slipped her wand into one of the deep pockets. "We're going on a shopping trip to Diagon Alley."

Cordelia lit up, pushed the bowl away, jumped to her feet. "Really?! Does that mean I get to go to Hogwarts early? Can I go back with Severus when he comes home for Christmas break?"

It was coming up quickly; if it was really true, Cordelia calculated, she would be going to Hogwarts in barely more than two weeks.

"Shhh," Eileen admonished, even though they were the only two in the house, "No, you can't go to Hogwarts until after you get your letter, you know that. And you _can't_ tell anyone that we went, remember. Not even Severus."

"Am I getting my wand early?" she asked eagerly.

"No," Eileen said again, "Finish your porridge, we can't afford to let it go to waste."

She ate her breakfast in record time, slipped on her worn trainers and Severus' old overcoat, and they left hand in hand for the train station. They were taking the train into London; Cordelia had rarely been outside of her neighborhood, so it was a treat for her. There were all kinds of interesting people around, all sorts of bustling activities.

The most interesting thing of all though, was when her mother pulled her into a dark little pub called the Leaky Cauldron, and they slipped out through its back door. They were in an alley, until Eileen pulled out her wand and tapped on one of the bricks. Cordelia gasped in surprise and delight when the wall opened up, revealing a long, cobbled street filled with people wearing all manner of strange and eye-catching clothing.

There were long black robes that looked like the ones Severus had gotten for school; there were fuschia robes and green robes, and clothing that didn't look like anything Cordelia had ever seen or heard of before. There were shops that had broomsticks in the windows, shops that had owls in the windows, shops that had things Cordelia could only guess at in the windows.

The shop they ultimately went into, though, was far less interesting. Cordelia didn't even notice it until her mother steered her inside; there were no windows, and the doorway was narrow and dark. There was no sign overhead like most of the other stores had, but letters across the glass on the window said "Virasht's Occult Offerings. Potions, Talismans, and Oddities."

A small, hand-lettered sign had been taped up underneath it. It said, in crooked lettering, "Dark Creatures Welcome. We stock for you."

Inside, it was little more than a dark, dingy junk shop, as far as Cordelia could tell. There were rows of dusty glass bottles with liquids of all different colors inside; grimy little knickknacks that looked like they had been dug up from someone's basement; moldy, yellowed books that made the whole place smell. Dust swirled around the doorway when they entered, and Cordelia sneezed.

An old, grizzled-looking man grinned wolfishly at them from behind the shop's counter. "'Ello, ladies," he said, and Cordelia shrank behind her mother, still gripping her hand tightly. "Virasht Sixclaw, Proprietor. Would ye be looking for a talisman? Something to ward off -" and he grinned, a gnarled, toothy, and altogether terrifying look, "Werewolves, p'raps?"

"Werewolves?" Cordelia whispered in alarm, looking anxiously up at her mother, "Are those real?"

The grizzled man chuckled, even though Cordelia didn't think she'd spoken loud enough for him to hear. "Oh, they're realer than my own two hands," he said, placing his hands on the counter, spreading the fingers out. Cordelia recoiled when she saw his twisted, dirty hands. He was missing the pinkie and ring fingers from both hands, and on all the other digits, his fingernails were long, dirty, jagged. "Or should I say, what's left of 'em." He chuckled again, hoarse and rough, and Cordelia shuddered. "Was a werewolf got the rest of my fingers."

He leaned over the counter, peering at Cordelia as she peeked out from behind her mother.

"'Course, that'd make me a werewolf, too. if ye believe the tales."

Cordelia squeaked in terror, and the man threw his head back and laughed, a deep, grating belly laugh that echoed off the four walls of the tiny shop.

Eileen patted her daughter's hand, wrapped one arm around her. "We're looking for-" she swallowed, glanced down at her daughter's dark head, looked back at the man, trying to conceal her own fear and unease, "Blood," she said, voice quavering; she tried to meet his eyes, tightened her hold on Cordelia.

"Potion-grade?" he asked, leering at them, "I think not though, since ye could get that at the Apothecary across th'way. No," he grinned, yellowed, sharp teeth on display, "If ye're in my shop, ye'r here for blood ye can consume. Only… Ye don't much look like a vampire, missy."

He made a show of squinting at Eileen, as if she were a puzzle he could solve; although, judging by his expression, he might have believed she was a puzzle he could solve by eating her. Cordelia felt blood trickle down her chin, realized that she was biting her lip again, couldn't bring herself to unclench her jaw and stop.

"Do you have it, or not?" She tried to sound steely, but instead it came out as a whine. Virasht walked slowly around the counter, coming out from behind it to stand in front of them. Cordelia clutched her mother's coat like it was a life-raft; both of them stepped back involuntarily. Virasht stepped over to the shelves lined with bottles, ran his fingers across a row of them. Dust smeared away from the labels on each of the bottles he touched. He paused, a dark look on his face. Tilted his head with mock curiosity or concern.

"So if it ain't ye," he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, "It must be th' wee one." he leaned forward, peering down at her; she tried to back up further, but bumped into another set of shelves behind her. "Oh, aye," he said, "I see the wee fangs. But I see blood, too, and it looks like yer own."

He looked back up at Eileen. "An 'alf-blood. 'Ave ye found out yet if she can turn 'em?" he asked, greed lighting his beady eyes, "I can give ye a discount if ye bring me new customers." The wolfish grin was back; Cordelia whimpered involuntarily.

Eileen cleared her throat; forced a note of resolve into her voice. "We'll buy two bottles."

Virasht looked disappointed; but he stepped back, picked two of the dust-covered bottles off the shelf. "Can't stock human blood," he said, "Trade Laws won't allow it. Pity, if ye ask me. My customers tell me there's naught else near as potent, but if ye want it, ye'll have to get it from the source." The yellow teeth flashed again, and he glanced down at Cordelia. "If ye do that, girly, let me know if it turns 'em. Wasn't kidding about the discount."

He looked back up at Eileen. "Best I can do is pig's blood. It ain't th'real thing, but it's better'n all the other stuff ye can buy. Most shops'll just sell ye rodent blood, but Virasht only carries pig an' goat. Closest to human ye can legally sell. It's costly, though." He wiped the bottles with a grimy rag, set them down on the counter.

"Four Galleons an' Ten Sickles for two bottles," he said, and Eileen flushed as she pulled the wizarding coins from her pocket, counting them three times before handing them over. She was loathe to part with all that money, and Virasht must've seen it, because he snatched the coins from her as soon as she held them out. He slipped the money into the pocket of his own dirty, tattered robes, and pushed the bottles across the wooden counter. They slid heavily. Eileen picked them up, tucked them into the folds of her jacket, and stepped quickly out of the store.

When they were back out in Diagon Alley, Cordelia felt tears of relief sliding hotly down her cheeks. "Mum, that man was scary," she whispered, choking back a sob. "Why did we have to buy blood? I'm not a v-vampire."

Eileen pressed her lips together for the second time that day.

"Are vampires even _real_?" she asked tearfully.

"Shh," Eileen hushed her, pulling her along the street again. They stopped at a much more cheerful place there was an outdoor patio and a brightly colored sign that read "Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour". Eileen directed Cordelia to a seat, ordered tea for herself and a tiny dish of vanilla ice cream for her daughter. She sat across from Cordelia on the spindly cafe chair, zipping the two glass bottles carefully into her jacket.

Cordelia didn't think there was much that would cheer her up after the horribly frightening encounter in the store, but the ice cream certainly helped. Never mind that it was December, and the air was chill enough to make her breath fog; ice cream was ice cream.

"No telling anyone we were here today," Eileen said again, "Especially not about all that money. And you must never, _never_ say the word -" she leaned across the table, whispered "_vampire_", pulled back again, "in our house."

"But Mum," Cordelia said, turning her light blue eyes on her mother, "It's not true, is it? What that man said?"

Eileen took a sip of tea, set the cup carefully back down, put a hand to her own forehead, and sighed heavily. "It… it's partly true," she said, and Cordelia's spoon dropped back down into the dish of partly eaten ice cream, jaw dropping along with it.

"This is… I didn't want to tell you at all, and certainly not like this. Curse that old bast-" her eyes cut down to her teacup and back up, and she cleared her throat again.

"It's… what he called you," she said carefully, "There is… it is part of what you are. I didn't think… sometimes, it doesn't get passed on, but then there was the hospital, and the fainting…your teeth..."

"Mum," Cordelia said, pleadingly, ice cream forgotten. "Stop. You're saying silly things. I'm not… I'm just a regular person, like you, and like Severus. Like Dad, even."

Eileen sucked in a breath, took a fortifying sip of her tea; resolve crossed her plain features, and she locked eyes with her daughter. "Yes," she said, "Yes, you are a regular person. It's not like that man said. It's just an illness, Cordelia. It's just something you were born with, and this… the stuff in the bottles is your medicine, okay?"

Cordelia wrinkled her nose, pushed the half-eaten, now-melted dish of ice cream away. "I am _not_ drinking blood," she said, her horror making her forget to keep her voice low.

"Shh!" Eileen hissed. "Cordelia, you can't talk about it, not here and not anywhere. Just… just pretend it's juice," she said desperately, "You have to try it, Cordelia, or you'll… you'll get sicker. You'll faint again, and if you wind up back in the hospital, they'll-"

She paused, scooted her chair closer to her daughter's glanced around nervously; there was no one else eating ice cream on this December afternoon; people walked by on the sidewalks, but no one really paid the pair any mind.

"You know how being a witch is a very important secret that you can't talk about to Muggles?" her mother murmured, leaning into her ear. Cordelia felt her mother's breath hot and moist against her cheek. She nodded.

"Well, this… this illness is much more secret than that," she said, "You can't tell _anyone,_ especially not T- your father, and not any other Muggle. They'll… Cordelia, people don't understand v- this illness. They'll hurt you if they find out."

Cordelia's eyes filled with tears again, and Eileen pulled her close, even though it was awkward from her separate chair. "Shh," her mother tried again.

Cordelia barely felt the warmth of her mother's embrace; all she could feel was the hard coldness of those glass bottles tucked into her mother's jacket, pressing against her.


End file.
